


A Legacy

by threecee



Series: Exit Wounds [7]
Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Cliffhangers, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-24 22:35:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22005562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threecee/pseuds/threecee
Summary: Illya receives a mysterious envelope with surprising information.
Relationships: Illya Kuryakin & Napoleon Solo
Series: Exit Wounds [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1175675
Comments: 5
Kudos: 5





	A Legacy

“The past is never where you think you left it.” ― Katherine Anne Porter

I walked all the way home, needing the time to get my emotions under control. I was furious and disgusted with myself, uncertain about my purpose with UNCLE.  
The image of the little boy seeing the bullet destroy his mother’s head reminded me of seeing my adopted family shot. I understood the boy taking the gun and shooting at us. I hadn’t had a weapon, but I had hit, kicked, bit, scratched, and head-butted the Nazi murderers as they tied me up. I wanted to kill them all, just as the boy Michael must have wanted to kill Napoleon and me. 

I have killed so many people so casually, certain that my cause justified it. The people I killed may have had families, children. That was never taken into consideration. How many THRUSH laboratories and satrapies had I blown up, enjoyed blowing up, without any thought to the people who would be killed in the explosion? Were the janitors, file clerks, lab assistants, all truly evil and deserving of death? Who was I to decide that they should die when I have done evil things myself?

By this point, I was outside of Sobol’s liquor store. I slowed, debating buying a bottle of Stoli. I decided it was too expensive for just getting drunk, so I purchased two bottles of the cheapest Polish vodka instead. Getting as drunk as I planned to do is masochistic, but doing it on Polish vodka is truly a terrible penance.

Entering the vestibule of my apartment house, I saw an envelope shoved halfway into the letter slot of my mailbox. It took a moment to work it back out without tearing because it was rather thick. It was addressed to me under my “at home” alias: Illya Alexandrovich Kuznetsov. Just the name, no address, no postage. Obviously, hand delivered. That is never good.

As always, my landlady popped out of her ground floor apartment as I came through the inner door. After exchanging greetings with her, I asked if she had seen who delivered the letter. She bridled at the question. Of course, she had seen the person! She knew what went on in her building.  
This is true. UNCLE Security could take lessons from her. 

Her description was an older man, maybe six feet tall, sturdy but not fat, longish white hair, bushy white beard, wearing a long black coat or robe, and a round black hat. She thought maybe he was a rabbi come to see Mrs. Markovic, and was going to tell him she was out taking little Benjamin for his daily airing, but he was just in the vestibule for a second and then left before she got there. 

She started wondering why a rabbi would want to leave a letter for a good Ukrainian Orthodox boy, as she insists I am. She has asked Father Demyan to pray for my safety many times and she knows he would be glad to see me in church if I want to come with her on Sunday. 

I managed to detach myself from this recurring theme by telling her that the letter was probably from an informant in the diamond smuggling case I was working on. “Illya Kuztnetsov” is an undercover agent in the Organized Crime Unit of an unspecified agency, generally assumed to be FBI. So much is explained by that cover story: prolonged absences, injuries, insistence on caution should anyone inquire about me, even any accidental glimpse of my gun. 

Once in my apartment, I examined the envelope carefully before opening it. Ordinary cheap office envelope. Nothing dangerous inside, just papers. Papers that completely shattered everything I thought I knew.

The first item was a Polaroid photo. It showed a little girl of perhaps ten or eleven years, with blue eyes and bright red curly hair.

On the back of the photo someone had printed in Hebrew: Yehudit bat Eliyahu Chaikin.  
The next item was a note typed on very ordinary office paper by what was probably an old European typewriter. 

She is in danger. Bar du Coq, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. Tuesday 23:35 Contact will wear red anemone. Say: the kaliant is lovely. Response: the kalyna is also beautiful. You will be taken to her.

Finally there was a cutting from Haaretz dated last month. An obituary for a Tikva bat Itzhak Chaikin who had been killed by a suicide bomber in an outdoor market. She had been a chemical engineer at Technion’s Combustion and Rocket Propulsion Laboratory. She was a widow and was survived by one child. The accompanying photograph was a little blurry and the woman was a few years older with a shorter hairstyle, but still recognizable as Nadezhda Isaakivna Kuryakina.

Nadya had been a rocket fuel specialist for the Soviet space program under Alexei Mikhailovich Isayev, and she had attempted to defect to Israel while I was at UNCLE Survival School. 

She was with a small group of refuseniks. They were shot at by the border guards, got away, but her body was found a couple months later in a ravine, apparently having bled out from gunshot wounds. Weather, wolves, and other animals had made it difficult, but the KGB was able to get an identification.

I only learned of her death when I returned from Survival School to my first posting in England. Waverly himself had come to give me the news. He assured me that the identification of the body was certain and showed me the slender file compiled by an agent from UNCLE’s Berlin HQ. 

I had taken Waverly’s word for what happened, but how accurate was the information he was given? Could she still have been alive? I know she would have gone to Israel if she managed to defect. She couldn't have taken the risk of contacting me even if she had known where I was.

Why had I received this letter now? Was it a trap by THRUSH? The KGB? The GRU? The CIA? The FBI? Some other enemy? 

Could I even trust that Waverly had believed the report of her death, or had he decided she was less of an encumbrance dead than as a defector? It certainly meant the USSR no longer had any hostage to control me, and Waverly had had to fight to keep them from recalling me. 

The first step was to go to the library and find anything about Tikva Chaikin in the last few years. Then I would decide if I was going to Switzerland. 

The New York Public Library had some journal articles by T. Chaikin. Nothing until 1961, then articles began to appear in professional science journals. All related to Nadya’s specialty, although it looked like she had broadened the scope of her research in the last few years. She was also credited with a chapter in a textbook that was published just last year. My Hebrew is not up to technical articles, but the subject matter was Nadya’s area.

Next, I went through Israeli newspapers from the time she defected to a few years later. No mention of a marriage, a childbirth, anything. The obituary and the report of the bombing were both in the library’s copies of Haaretz and in the Jerusalem Post, so they hadn’t been faked. 

The only person I could trust with this information was Napoleon, but this had too many unknowns and I didn’t want to drag him into danger.

**Author's Note:**

> Technically this occurs before In the Wind and The Letter. I just thought it reads better this way.


End file.
